by
Martin Amis
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[...] His third novel wasn't published anywhere. Neither was his fourth. Neither was his fifth. In those three brief sentences we adumbrate a Mahabharata of pain. [...]
("The Mahābhārata is one of the two major Smriti texts and Sanskrit epics of ancient India revered in Hinduism, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa")
By the time he got the vacuum cleaner down into the hall Richard was sure that Samuel Beckett, at some vulnerable time in his life, had been obliged to take a vacuum cleaner in. Celine, too, and perhaps Kafka—if they had vacuum cleaners then. Richard gave himself a loud breather while he looked through his mail. His mail he no longer feared. The worst was over. Why should a man fear his mail, when, not long ago, he had received a solicitor's letter from his own solicitor? When, rather less recently, in response to a request for more freelance work, he had been summarily fired, through the post, by his own literary agent? When he was being sued (for advances paid on unwritten books) by both his ex-publishers? Most of the time, though, his mail was just junk. Once, in the street, on an agitated April afternoon, on his way back from lunch with some travel editor in some transient trattoria, he had seen a city cyclone of junk mail—leaflike leaflets, flying flyers, circling circulars— and had nodded, and thought: me, my life. And a lot of the time he got no mail at all. Now, on the morning of this his fortieth birthday, he received one small check and two large bills—and a brown envelope, hand-delivered (no address, no stamp), featuring his own name in tortured block capitals, with the accurate but unfamiliar addendum, "M.A. (Oxon)." He put it in his pocket, and once more shouldered his load.
god he's so funny
"One should remind oneself," said Balfour, as he said every week, "that James Joyce initially favored private publication." Then he added: "Proust, too, by the way."
"But that was ... Wasn't that just a maneuver? To avoid a homosexuality scandal," said Richard carefully. "Advice from Gide. Before Proust went to Gallimard."
"Nabokov," suggested Balfour.
"Yeah but that was just a book of love poems. When he was a schoolboy.”
"Nevertheless. Philip Larkin. And of course James Joyce."
Balfour was always doing this. Richard expected to learn that Shakespeare got his big break with a vanity publisher; that Homer responded to some ad whining for fresh trex. The Tantalus Press, it went without saying, was not a springboard to literary eminence. The Tantalus Press was a springboard to more of the same: to Another Gift from Genius. "Private" publishing was not organized crime exactly, but it had close links with prostitution. The Tantalus Press was the brothel. Balfour was the madam. Richard helped the madam out. Their writers paid them .. . And a writer ought to be able to claim that he had never paid for it—never in his life.
[...] Balfour said with infinite circumspection, "And how is your - how is your latest?"
"Nearly done." And he didn't go on to add—because he couldn't see that far ahead, because men can't see further than the next fight or fuck—that his latest might be his last. Not just couldn't see: couldn't look. That couldn't be looked at either.
"If for any reason you don't find a home for it, I would of course be proud to publish it under the Tantalus imprint."
It was midnight. Richard sloped out of his study and went to the kitchen in search of something to drink. Anything alcoholic would do. He experienced a thud of surprise, from temple to temple, when instead of the usual striplit void he confronted his wife. Gina was not a large woman, but the mass of her presence was dramatically augmented by the lateness of the hour. And by marriage, and by other things. He looked at her with his infidel's eyes. Her oxblood hair was up and back; her face was moist with half-assimilated night cream; her towel dressing gown revealed a triangle of bath-rouged throat. With abrupt panic Richard realized what had happened to her, what she had done: Gina had become a grownup. And Richard hadn't. Following the pattern of his generation (or its bohemian wing), Richard was going to go on looking the same until he died. Looking worse and worse, of course, but looking the same. Was it the kids, was it the job, was it the lover she must surely have by now (in her shoes, in her marriage—if Richard was married to Richard, he'd have one)? He couldn't object on grounds of ethics or equity. Because writing is infidelity. Because all writing is infidelity. She still looked good, she still looked sexual, she even still looked (you had to hand it to her) ... dirty. But Gina had made a definite move toward the other side.
Because . . . because then he would be left with experience, with untranslated and unmediated experience. Because then he would be left with life.
He was impotent with her every other night and, at weekends, in the mornings too—when those boys of his gave him half a chance! (The patter of tiny feet; the stubborn and inexpert worrying of the doorknob; the hoarse command from the bedroom met by puzzled whispers, puzzled withdrawal; the mind-filling silence before the sickening impact or collision—the scream, the wail.) Sometimes, when the Tulls' schedules conspired, he would be lazily impotent with her in the afternoons. Nor did the bedroom mark the boundary of their erotic play. In the last month alone, he had been impotent with her on the stairs, on the sofa in the sitting room and on the kitchen table. Once, after a party outside Oxford, he had been impotent with her right there on the backseat of the Maestro. Two nights later they got drunk, or rather Gina got drunk, because Richard was already drunk, and on their return from Pizza Express stole into the communal garden, using their key, and Richard was impotent with her in a sylvan setting. Impotent in a sylvan setting, under some dumb blonde of a willow, with Diana above them, her face half-averted, feeling wounded or betrayed, and higher, much higher, the winking starlets of the Milky Way.
It was quite clear to everyone that Gwyn and Demeter Barry had the perfect marriage. You only had to look at them to see that this was a match made in heaven.
They held hands all the time (they were "inseparable"). He called her love all the time. She gave him kisses on the cheek all the time. They were the fond, they were the ideal—they were the dream. Even Richard had to admit it: it was absolutely nauseating. Social diarists like Rory Plantagenet noted their practice, at parties and functions, of releasing each other "lingeringly" as the dynamics of the convivium urged them apart. Gwyn was known to fall into a reverie when his wife was several partygoers from his side: "Just gazing," he would say, when roused, "at my lady." (Richard, if he happened to be present and nearby, would similarly drift into a brown study: the sledgehammer in the alleyway, the poked chisel on the dark basement steps ...) Literary interviewers and profilists marked how Gwyn's face would "light up" when Demeter parted the double doors of the drawing room, bearing a tea tray on which Gwyn's favorite Chocolate Olivers were infallibly arrayed. (Reading this, Richard would light up too. Through the sigh of his cigarette smoke he would see the sidling berk with his tire tool, the jagged neck of the smashed beer bottle.) [...]
lol
[...] He looked down because the tramp he was stepping over (who intently ate dog food from the can with a plastic spoon) bore a close resemblance to his opera critic. So close that Richard even said, "Hugo?" But the tramp wasn't Hugo. Or Hugo wasn't the tramp. Not yet: not this week. Richard went inside and was relieved to see Hugo lying facedown on the stairs to the first-floor office. He stepped over Hugo and paused again in a marveling attempt to identify the source of the seal-house or dolphinarium sound effects (the hooting and squealing, the egregious belly-flops) which issued from the half-landing toilet. It was his ballet critic: Cosmo. Then he entered the literary department. His secretary came forward and helped him off with his mack.
"Thank you. Well, Anstice?"
Crooned at and lullabied, given snacks and glasses of water, its fears assuaged, The Little Magazine had been put to bed. Bruno, the theater critic, had finished his major piece on The Three Sisters. Unfortunately it proved to be only thirty words long. The opera critic, Hugo, had failed to write anything at all, despite spending the afternoon in a sinkful of iced water and despite engaging, with Anstice, in a program of deep-breathing exercises which reminded Richard of the classes he had attended with Gina: the adults sitting around on the floor and gazing up at teacher like the children they would shortly bear. Otto, the radio critic, finished his piece and then tore it up and threw it out the window. Several heads slewed round, at first in dismay and then in hard suspicion, when Inigo, the film critic, said through his tears that he was betraying his poetry by writing for money. You mean someone around here was getting money'? Towards dusk it looked for a while as though Richard and Anstice would be faced with another Black Friday. This was the occasion on which all seven arts writers—grouped about the place in varying postures of weary contemplation—had produced not a syllable between them. And Richard had hurled together a ragged quilt of house ads, overmatter, crosswords and killed chess columns.